Butte Irish

By Kevin Stevens

A hundred years ago, my grandfather, Charles Stevens, stepped off a train in Butte, Montana, to cover a miners’ strike for the Chicago Tribune. He found himself in one of the most vibrant places in America, a town a mile high in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains that boasted the tallest smokestack, the deepest mine shaft, and the longest bar in the world.

Literally, the city never slept: its brothels, gambling houses, and taverns were open twenty-four hours a day, catering to miners who worked round the clock extracting copper and silver from what was called The Richest Hill on Earth. Four days after he got there, Stevens wired his resignation to the Tribune and took an editorial job with a Butte paper. He never returned to Chicago.

Butte was known at the time as Ireland’s Fifth Province. The town’s neighbourhoods had names like Dublin Gulch and Corktown, and a quarter of its 50,000 residents were Irish – a higher percentage than any other city in America, including Boston. A huge number came from county Cork: the village of Eyeries alone sent 1200 emigrants to Butte between 1870 and 1915, and when the Allihies Copper Mines closed in the 1880s, most of the miners left for Montana. Over these decades, members of 77 different Sullivan families left the Beara Peninsula for Butte – and there are still more than a 100 Sullivans in the Butte phone book.

My grandfather arrived too late to meet Marcus Daly, the Copper King from Ballyjamesduff who discovered the richest copper vein in the world and parlayed it into a massive industrial empire of mines, smelters, railroad lines, and newspaper holdings. Before his death in 1900, Daly’s power, influence, and nostalgic nationalism had turned Butte into a haven for Irish immigrants. Stevens met and mingled with many of those who had benefited from Daly’s legacy, interviewing them, working with them, and coming to appreciate the savvy that enabled the Irish to control the political and cultural life of Butte, as was the case in so many American cities.

In 1905, Butte’s mayor was Jeremiah McCarthy, its police judge James Sullivan, its building inspector W.J. Kennedy, and its police chief John Lavelle. Margaret Kay Harrington headed the Women’s Protective Union, the first all-female union in the American West. Irish was widely spoken and Gaelic played alongside American football. Butte Irish were clannish, union-friendly, and highly politicized. Such was their dominance that Mohammed Akara, an Arab rug merchant who arrived in town around the same time as Charles Stevens, legally changed his name to Mohammed Murphy “for business reasons.”

Butte was America’s foremost mining town. There were 2700 miles of tunnels under the streets and shafts as deep as 4000 feet. At any given moment thousands of men toiled beneath the earth. And hardrock mining was a dangerous business. Butte miners were fully unionized and relatively well paid, but those who survived the numerous fires, cave-ins, gassings, and explosions still had to contend with a 50 percent chance of contracting silicosis – “miners’ consumption” – from breathing rock dust.

My grandfather soon became Mining and Financial Editor of the Anaconda Standard, the region’s largest newspaper. To report on mining in Butte was to report on politics. Always left-leaning, during the First World War Butte became the center of fierce antiwar activity. In 1911 the town had elected a Socialist mayor, Lewis Duncan, and his open opposition to the war, combined with Irish detestation of America’s alliance with Britain, created a volatile, confrontational relationship between the town’s working people and the establishment. There were lynchings, shootings, and a series of acrimonious strikes. From 1917 to 1921, Butte was occupied by the US Army, which broke the back of the labour movement and secured the interests of the Anaconda Copper Company, by then owned by Standard Oil.

But the worst violence happened underground. On the night of 8 June 1917, the flame of a miner’s lamp ignited a frayed power cable in the Granite Mountain shaft and fire roared through the tunnels, pushing smoke and gas throughout the workings. Within an hour 166 men had died.

Stevens maintained an all-night vigil on Granite Mountain and wrote the stories that covered the front page of the Standard the next morning. The listed dead included many Irish, but also Italians, Serbs, Croats, Cornish, Finns, and other nationalities, reflecting the huge diversity of the mining population. It was the most disastrous mining accident in history up to that time.

Eventually Charles Stevens went into politics himself and moved north to Great Falls. Butte’s mines gradually depleted. When hardrock mining became unprofitable, the Anaconda Company switched to open-pit mining in 1955. The last of these pits closed in the 1980s, leaving behind a sad legacy of toxic waste and environmental devastation.

But the town remains proud of its Irish heritage. St. Patrick’s Day has been a traditional day of revelry, but in recent years Butte has also hosted an “An Ri Ra” summer festival celebrating the Irish language, music, and dance. Last summer’s festival ended with an outdoor mass in Irish at Butte’s Emma Park. The longest bar in the world is gone, but Irish pubs are still plentiful, including the Irish Times Pub on Galena Street, whose motto would serve well for the town’s colourful history: “Making the world a better place, one drink at a time.”

Published in The Irish Times, 30 December 2005